A couple
of weeks ago Northumberland County Council reported to its secret cabinet that
the Government had left them with a £12M Black-Hole in their accounts through
Covid 19 and then spun that as news out into the local press.
Running stories based on Black-Holes has become a regular feature of the management style adopted by Councillor Oliver of Corbridge who holds the finance portfolio on Northumberland County Councils one party only ‘secret cabinet’. He located his first black hole back in 2017 a few weeks after his Tories took office and began paying handsome sums to officers they thought may not share their loyalty to them and those who may question their newly adopted delivery tea
Councillor
Olivers initial black hole wasn’t recorded in the first set of accounts put out
from the current Tory regime nor did the external auditor comment on it in his
annual report so we need to ask as county Laymen, when does a black hole in the
accounts become a recognised black hole and why has the Chairperson of internal
audit Councillor Ms Georgina Hill of Berwick not adopted a process for the true
recognition of the matter.
The
answer to that may lay in the fact that Councillor Ms Hill has been noted in a
report by an outgoing Nationally recognised external auditor of running an
internal audit committee that does not show any independence from the
administration whatsoever.
We will
give a couple of examples here:
Councillor Olivers first announced black hole in 2017 was not looked at by Ms.
Hills audit committee in any detail as no schedule explaining his accountancy
problem was put forward through the internal audit process. Therefore the
scrutiny of this item did not take place at committee or through the corporate
scrutiny panel of the Council but it was spun out into the mainstream media.
Also the
Council through its described non-independence has employed four heads of
finance in the last three years of office (a form of tantrum management maybe?
).This has led to possible black holes being missed from Ms Hills agenda such
as the dreadful change from successful arms length company ARCH to mediocre
Advance Northumberland where the huge costs of change from one to the other
were reported by the external auditor but not correctly brought for debate and
scrutiny to the internal audit committee by neither the Internal Auditor nor Ms
Hills. This could be a correct example of a black hole that was clearly missed
through the non-independence of her and her internal audit team and committee.
When
coupled with the massive losses made by Advance Northumberland in the last two
financial years Councillor’s Oliver and Hills missed three opportunities to
report and have recorded true ‘black-holes’ in the accounts but didn’t bother
as we laymen suspect they were caused through the political management of the
current administration and we can’t have that reported can we?
So back
to our original question, when is a black hole a true black hole and when is it
just sci-fi. I bet the Government audit office will be checking on Councillor
Olivers latest outburst before settling on a figure the Government owes
Northumberland as they will not have missed their questionable recent financial
history.
